At one point in The Rehearsal’s second season, as Nathan Fielder addresses a government hearing about aviation safety, a member of Congress asks why a comedian known for “pranks” suddenly cares about preventing plane crashes. This is The Rehearsal, though, so this entire set up is one of Fielder’s “pranks.” It’s not a real hearing or a real member of Congress; it’s a “rehearsal” for a potential one that Fielder hopes to testify at. It’s just one of the many facades Fielder constructs across these six episodes, stacking and cross-cutting between them to the point where the line between truth and fiction isn’t just blurred but totally obliterated.

The White House has begun the process of looking for a new secretary of defense, according to a U.S. official who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Growing reports of overcrowding and mistreatment at Florida’s largest immigration enforcement facility have sparked protests and are yet another example of the use of cruelty as a deterrent

The Libertarian Party of Travis County, Texas, has passed a resolution calling for President Donald Trump to be impeached, accusing him of issuing "lawless, dictatorial pronouncements" that "violate the constitutional separation of powers." The resolution cited the Trump administration's inability to get Kilmar Abrego Garcia returned from an El Salvadoran prison, threats to send American citizens to foreign prisons and its deportation of legal U.S. residents "due to their political viewpoints."

It was a nation of dreams, built for the screen. Then it shattered

Warner Bros.’ unusual agreement with the director has rival executives sweating, with some saying it sets a “dangerous” precedent.

The Trump administration claims Harvard should have known its wild demand letter was sent in error.

In March, a massive bushfire burned more than 5,400 acres in the park, injuring some of the koalas and destroying a large amount of eucalyptus leaves, their food. The government says the controversial program is intended to end the koalas’ suffering from burns and starvation. But some koala advocates say there’s more to the story. The animals are not only starving because of the fire but because logging and development has destroyed much of their habitat in Victoria. Advocates have also pointed out that there are commercial plantations of blue gum eucalyptus around Budj Bim National Park that koalas have come to rely on. When those plantations are harvested, the koalas living in them move into Budj Bim, putting pressure on what natural forests remain in the park. A fire only makes the situation worse — destroying food in a region with a dense population of koalas.

The problem, say scholars at Google's DeepMind unit, is not the tests themselves but the limited way AI models are developed. The data used to train AI is too restricted and static, and will never propel AI to new and better abilities.

Contested discovery achieved by experiment firing laser pulses into eyes, stimulating retina cells

Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen shares a photo with the man whose return was ordered by the top US court.

These are just the US executioners we know. But they are a chilling indication of the executioners we don’t know

A loss for Google.

A 30-year-old community service program that sends young adults to work on projects across the U.S. was the latest target of the Trump administration’s campaign to slash government spending. AmeriCorps’ National Civilian Community Corps informed volunteers Tuesday that they would exit the program early “due to programmatic circumstances beyond your control,” according to an email obtained by The Associated Press. [...] The unsigned memo to corps members said NCCC’s “ability to sustain program operations” was impacted by the Trump administration’s priorities and President Donald Trump’s executive order creating the Department of Government Efficiency. Members would be officially dismissed April 30. Funding for AmeriCorps and NCCC has long been scrutinized when Congress talks of budget trims. The federal agency’s budget showed NCCC funding amounted to nearly $38 million last fiscal year. [...] Young corps members were told Tuesday night to pack up. Many started long road trips from their latest assignment to campuses in Vicksburg, Mississippi; Vinton, Iowa; Sacramento, California; and Aurora, Colorado. Members would receive their allowance and health coverage through the end of April, according to the memo.

The New York City mayoral frontrunner, sexual harasser, & nipple clamp enthusiast also argued that the Democratic party had “hijacked” itself with cultural issues.

Massive Blue is helping cops deploy AI-powered social media bots to talk to people they suspect are anything from violent sex criminals all the way to vaguely defined “protesters.”

I had moved to the West Bank during the brief season—we could not have known how brief—in which it was possible to believe that even the cruelest regimes might be toppled by people filling the streets and squares and, without weapons or the need for violence, demanding a life of dignity. That moment had passed by the time I left, but the movement limped on, growing closer to death while other approaches gained momentum: spates of solitary stabbings and car rammings. In 2015, the year after Israel’s previous war on Gaza, rammings increased by a factor of six. Over the next seven years, settler assaults on Palestinians jumped ninefold. The number of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers began to rise dramatically in 2021, and in the years leading up to the October 7, 2023, attacks, armed groups of Palestinians started to reappear in the cities of the northern West Bank. Elsewhere the months rolled by, but whenever I returned or checked in with friends, Palestine seemed stuck in a rut: years of passivity and despair followed by giddy weeks of chaos in which it felt like everything might change, until despair settled over everything again. The repetition was hard to bear. People I had come to care about gradually disappeared. Those who could left. Others died or went to prison or suffered some slow internal death invisible to those who didn’t know them. Their absences haunt this story, but they also add up to a different kind of absence: the missing voices of people who have devoted their lives, at great cost, to speaking out, and who now find themselves too afraid to speak.

The perception of geometric regularity in shapes, a form of elementary Euclidean geometry, is a fundamental mathematical intuition in humans. We demonstrate this geometric understanding in an animal, the carrion crow. Crows were trained to detect a visually distinct intruder shape among six concurrent arbitrary shapes. The crows were able to immediately apply this intruder concept to quadrilaterals, identifying the one that exhibited differing geometric properties compared to the others in the set. The crows exhibited a geometric regularity effect, showing better performance with shapes featuring right angles, parallel lines, or symmetry over more irregular shapes. This performance advantage did not require learning. Our findings suggest that geometric intuitions are not specific to humans but are deeply rooted in biological evolution.

The unexpected debate has emerged as GOP lawmakers look for ways to pay for their massive budget bill and as the party's electoral coalition shifts.

"I don't have to work," Gates said. "I choose to work. Because? Because it's fun."